[mrweasel]

From experience: If you don't know Danish, please don't ever use machine translators to translate from English. Regardless of what some people may think, they make mistakes, so many mistakes.

I get why it's tempting, good translators are expensive, and few and far between. A friend of my is a professional translator and she's not exactly in need of work, but a lot of customers look at her prices and opt for machine translations instead and the result not always impressive. Errors range from wrong words, bad sentence structure to an inability to correctly translate cultural references.

[embedding-shape]

Right, makes sense for Danes, or other population where English knowledge is basically ubiquitous. But I'm think it might look differently in other places, if the choice is between "Badly translated but I can understand 95% of it" and "In a language I don't understand at all, maybe 1% I could figure out", then the choice might be a bit different.

[ploum]

nope, let the user does the translation, with his own choice of tool and being thus perfectly aware of the shortcomings.

I know that some people translate my French posts to read them. That’s really cool. But I would never post something I didn’t write myself (but I use spellcheking tools. I even sometimes disagree with them)

[embedding-shape]

> let the user does the translation

Not everyone can. Try going to rural Spain and handing out flyers in English and ask them to translate it themselves, 0% of the people will translate it themselves, it'll go straight into the trash. If you instead hand them something in a language they understand, there is a least a chance they'll read it, even though probably 5% will do so.

It's sometimes useful to understand that the world is much bigger and varied than what you experience locally, and what works for you and the people in one country, doesn't always work the same everywhere.

[ploum]

Your example is completely stupid: I’m talking about writing a website.

Would you go to rural Spain without knowing a word of Spanish and handle flyers with a Spanish text you had no way to check? Seriously?

[duskdozer]

I meant in contexts like online discussions, not like a news article or something. Is the result completely unintelligible, or just not great?

[runarberg]

There are levels to things. In a professional context (including product design and documentation/instructions) don‘t use machine translation[†].

For your personal hobby site or for general online communication, you probably shouldn’t use machine translation, but it is probably useful if have B1 language skills and are checking up on your grammar, vocabulary, etc. As for using LLMs to help you write, I certainly prefer people use the traditional models over LLMs, as the traditional models still require you to think and forces you to actually learn more about the output language.

For reading somebody else’s content in a language you don‘t understand, machine translation is fine up to a point, as long as you are aware that it may not be accurate.

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† In fact I personally I think EU should mandate translator qualification, and probably would have only 20 years ago when consumer protection was still a thing they pretended to care about.